Judging Freedom - Kyle Anzalone : Anti-War Wrap

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Kyle Anzalone : Anti-War WrapSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 24th, 2024. Kyle Anzalone joins us now. Kyle, it's a pleasure, my friend. Thank you very much for joining us. What conceivable military purpose could there possibly be to the use of a drone filled with cluster bombs to attack beach govers in Sevastopol, Crimea, Russia? Yeah, Judge, it's a real tragedy what happened in Crimea yesterday when Ukraine

launched a Slavo of Atakum missiles from the United States. According to Russia, these were the cluster variant of the munitions, and while they were able to down four, a fourth one exploded over a beach. Now, apparently this beach was near some kind of military installation and possibly could have been on the way there. However, it was flying over a civilian area and it did drop its bomblets, causing a lot of havoc on the ground. Two children killed, 27 children in total hospital lives, over 100 people in total hospital lives, four dead. And Russia is very, very upset. We had the Russian foreign ministry summon the American ambassador, inform the American ambassador that this makes the Americans a party to the conflict. The Russians say that they used American satellite

technology, American helped planning this attack. It was with an American missile. Essentially, Judge, all the Ukrainians did is pit the target and hit the big red button. And the Russians say they're going to retaliate against the U.S. in some form for this. Aren't the cluster bombs illegal or are they illegal for everybody but the U.S.? Well, there is an international treaty outlawing cluster munitions in the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia are all not a party to that treaty. However, there is a U.S. law that bans munitions with submunitions, which are forms of cluster bombs, whether they're artillery shells or like these attack missiles, that have a dud rate, I believe above 2% is the threshold in the law,

that those would be banned. And the New York Times did an article, I believe above 2% is the threshold in the law, that those would be banned. And the New York Times did an article, I believe it was in the spring of 2023, really detailing how the cluster munitions the U.S. is sending to Ukraine has dud rates of between 14 and 25%. But the U.S. is just ignoring that and claiming it's under 2% so we could send these weapons to Ukraine. What's a dud rate? So a dud rate is a cluster munition that explodes and drops dozens, sometimes hundreds of submunitions on the ground. These are much smaller, maybe the size of a hand grenade. Now most, but not all of these explode.

And so particularly as a legacy of the Vietnam War and what was done in Cambodia, there's these bomblets, and at the time it was sometimes, I think, 50% for some of these munitions. The bomblets didn't explode, and so the ground in these countries is littered with these submunitions. And so if farmers are plowing their fields and hit them with their plows, they'll go off, they kill farmers. Children see these shiny metal balls on the ground, pit them up, throw them around, and then a child ends up getting killed. Tens of thousands have been killed and maimed by these since the end of the Vietnam War, and that's why they're outlawed. And yet the U.S. is allowing

Ukraine to use them all over what is supposed to be one day Ukrainian territory again, but again, it's now going to be littered with these submunitions. Do you think we're sending these cluster bombs over there because we've run out of the 155 millimeter artillery shells that they so desperately want because they use more than we can manufacture? Yeah, Judge, that's absolutely the case. American lawmakers explicitly said that. In fact, some lawmakers said, well, we're going to have to destroy these because we can't use them because of the laws on submunitions. And so why

don't we send those to Ukraine so at least we don't have to pay to get them destroyed? And yeah, the Biden administration was very explicit when they ran out of 155 millimeter shells that they had decided to send these cluster variants. And with the Atacoms, it's the same situation. Initially, Lloyd Austin said we couldn't send the Atacoms to Ukraine because we only had a limited number of the variant with the conventional warhead, the solitary munition. But we had a bunch of these ones that had cluster munitions, and that's what we ended up sending. Here's a full screen of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He's not happy. I'm going to read this for the benefit of the folks that are experiencing judging freedom

audio only. The U.S. is responsible for this massacre, and they will get an answer. All flight missions for American ATAKOMS missiles are programmed by American specialists based on their own U.S. satellite intelligence data. Therefore, the responsibility for the deliberate missile strike against the civilian population of Sevastopol lies primarily with Washington, which supplied this weapon to Ukraine, as well as with the Kiev regime from whose territory this strike was launched. Such actions will not go unanswered. That's Foreign Minister Lavrov yesterday. Does the West take him seriously?

Oh, unfortunately not, Judge. At the beginning of this war, if you'll remember, President Joe Biden said, we're not going to send Ukraine F-16s, Abram Tains, Salawatats on Ukrainian soil, all because that would provoke World War III and lead to a direct U.S.-Russian conflict, that we were closer to a nuclear conflict any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so, yes, you know, this should be a major concern. But now you have the White House and Brussels, Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, all saying that they're no longer concerned that Russia is going to escalate to direct attacks. And Russia is saying they are going to issue some kind of response. I'm not sure what that response will be, but I do expect Russia to do something in the coming days. Russia can attack American troops that are assembling and dispatching these cluster bombs. I'm sure they know exactly where they are, whether they're in Poland, Romania, or out of uniform and in Ukraine.

Absolutely. That's one option. I really hope Putin doesn't go that route. The Russians did point to a global hog drone that was operating near Crimea when this attack occurred as a part of their evidence that the Americans were involved and helped to coordinate this attack. And so I wouldn't be surprised to see the Russians either shoot down or in some way down an American drone. I believe the Iranians downed a version of the Russia Hawk or the Skyhawk, Global Hawk, whatever that drone is, under the Trump administration. And then the Russians downed a drone over the Blattsy. I think that was an MQ-9 Reaper drone by dumping diesel fuel on it. So they have a multitude of ways to take down these drones. I'm sure even electronic interference at this point could probably do it. But I think Russia might mess with some of the American drones in the region in response. Isn't it kind of obvious that this war is about to escalate and the West, including the United States, is going to get

involved? It certainly seems that way, Judge. We're moving in that direction step by step. First, I think it'll be the French. It seems that Paris is really working with Kiev on trying to put together this coalition of NATO forces to train Ukrainian troops inside of Ukraine. This seems like an absolutely ludicrous thing to do. Why not just train them in Romania or Poland or Germany and ship them to Ukraine? It only takes a couple hours, but that seems to be the plan, the direction we're headed. And once these French troops start getting killed by Russian missiles, then what are the Americans going to do? Are they just going to stand by? I don't think that happens. I think we really ramp up and continue to in the months to come. Are we shooting at Russian troops in Syria?

I mean, the U.S. has killed in one incident, I think this was maybe in 2017, a few hundred Russian mercenaries in Syria. And so that certainly has been going on for some time. We've conducted drone strikes in Syria, mainly against Shia militia groups that are tied either to Assad, Iran or Hezbollah. And I believe we conducted one of those strikes this past week or maybe two of those strikes, the Russians said, on pro-Assad forces in Syria. But I'm not aware of any recent attacks on Russian forces inside of Syria from the U.S. or our allies, our proxy force, the Kurds inside Syria. Antiwar.com published an interesting piece this morning by Doug Bandow that Biden can't define victory in Ukraine. For a while, he was saying, as long as it takes, as long as it takes, as long as it takes to do what? How ill prepared is the administration to say what their goal is in Ukraine?

Well, yeah, Judge, they can't admit the truth because they told the Ukrainians that they get to lead the negotiations and that we will support them to do whatever they want to do. And Zelensky has gone completely mad. Even his own advisors are saying that he's delusional and messianic and that he believes that Ukraine can reconquer up to its 1991 borders. And that includes Crimea, the areas in the north, the east and the south. And it seems utterly unachievable at this point. Ukraine is struggling to mount a defense against the Russian forces. So the idea that they're going to go on this major offensive and not just retake the Donbass regions, but Crimea is completely absurd. And saying that the war is going to go on short of that just simply does not

make sense. And because the Biden administration is afraid to walk back from its position that we're going to allow the Ukrainians to do whatever they want, and we're going to give them the arms to make that possible, then yeah, you know, there's just no realistic goal for how this war in Ukraine could end from the American and Western perspective. And there has to be some agreement from the Western side or the war cannot end. I'm sure that if you ask Senator Graham or Victoria Nuland or Hillary Clinton in a private moment, they might tell you that their goal is to drive Vladimir Putin from office by using Ukraine as a battering ram. But I don't think anybody can realistically articulate or expect that to be the case today. No. And you would think that Nland and graham know better but they these people you know have

schemes and they think they're smarter than any everyone else and so remember when victoria newland was leaving she says we're gonna have some nasty surprises for russia on the battlefield maybe she really thinks there's something in place that is ultimately going to change the dynamics here i mean it seems completely absurd at this point, Judge, and every single one of your guests has been telling the truth about this for years now, but it really seems like the people in power, first of all, just aren't very smart, and secondly, are filled with hubris and just believe they could do whatever they want to the rest of the world, and eventually it will bend to their ways and ideas.

Well, that's the American exceptionalism launched after World War II and fomented by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and those folks. And quite frankly, embraced by every president since Cheney, maybe every president since Eisenhower. If anything's a failure it's it's that um has the president authorized uh the ukrainians to use american offensive weaponry to strike anywhere underscore anywhere in russia so according to the Washington Post, and this is according to the Washington Post, so it could be wrong. What Washington has allowed Kiev to do is still limited to strikes within 100 miles of the border of Sumy and Kharkiv, Ukraine. So that is pretty deep in Russian territory, but that's what they've limited them to at this point. Although we continue to have U.S. officials say, well, we're going to allow them to do what made sense. And I think what

made sense is continuously going to expand. And also there's all Crimea that the U.S. has signed off on Ukraine hitting. Okay. Let's switch gears to Israel and Gaza. Did the IDF kill another 100 Palestinians over the weekend? Absolutely, Judge. There were a series of massacres across the Gaza Strip, I think mostly from central Gaza on down to the south, including in the safe zones and supposed displaced people's camps, these tent cities that the Palestinians have set up, that Israel continues to rain bombs down on. Just some of the images coming out of this, absolutely horrific. I saw one adult carrying two child casualties, one in each arm, just looked like lifeless bodies, blood pouring off of their faces. I mean, what Israel is doing in Gaza is a horror. I just read

a report from Save the Children, which is an international organization that now estimates that 21,000 Gazan children, and this is in addition to the 14,000 that are confirmed dead, but 21,000 Gazan children are missing. Now they estimate that 17,000 of those are just somewhere separated from their parents or family. Closest relative doesn't know where they are. But there's an additional 4,000 that they say are either dead and buried under the rubble or are buried in mass graves. And now you have these poor Palestinian parents who go to the sites of these mass graves or where they're digging bodies out of the rubble. And they're hoping, I guess, probably not hoping, but they're looking at these bodies and wondering if there's the partial decomposed corpse of their child and if they're going to be able to identify it. I mean, the suffering going on in Gaza is just

uncomparable. When will Netanyahu and company be held accountable for this? When will the International Criminal Court decide whether or not to accept those indictments and issue those arrest warrants? time that Israel is an apartheid state and it shouldn't have taken this ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza to get somebody to start taking action and trying to hold Israeli officials accountable. But now that that process is in motion, it's interesting that we have not only Netanyahu coming to the U.S. later this month, but right now the defense minister, Yoav Galant, who is another one of the people named in Karim Khan's indictment. He's looking for an arrest warrant for this Galant. And he's traveling to the U.S. to meet with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin right now to plan out what Israel is doing next in the Middle East. And that may not just be operations in Gaza, but also southern Lebanon. Has Israel granted more rights to settlers to kill Palestinians who get in their

way? Certainly, Judge, and there's two really good articles on this I recommend people check out. One is published at Antiwar.com by our friend Connor Freeman, and you can find it there. And the other one is an editorial by Haaretz. And what they lay out is basically what Betzel Smoltrich, the Israeli finance minister, said in a speech, which is that covertly Netanyahu has transferred a lot of power away from the Israeli defense forces, the Israeli military, and to civilian administration of settlers in the West Bank and given them a lot of authorization, essentially a blank check to start to annex the West Bank. And so, yeah, this is leading to a lot more deaths of Palestinians as the Israelis try to drive them off their land, set up new settlements, and finally take the West Bank away from the Palestinians. Using the settlers as sort of a loose militia funded by ultimately the U.S., but under what purports to be Israeli legal approval. Absolutely. And throughout this war, Itmar Ben-Gavir, the national security minister of Israel,

has been handing out rifles to Israeli settlers. And so making sure that they're very well armed. And a lot of these were American weapons, American-made rifles. I mean, Ben-Gavir is not only the most right-wing fanatical member of Prime Minister Netanyahu's coalition in the Knesset, he's also the head of their equivalent of the FBI. I mean, this would be like Chris Wray, the head of the American FBI, joining the mob on January 6th. I mean, this is just almost inconceivable what this guy gets away with, because Netanyahu knows the minute he slaps the wrist of Ben-Gavir, Ben-Gavir and company leave the coalition.

Netanyahu doesn't have a majority. He's out of a job and he can be prosecuted. Well, one thing Smoltrich says, and I think he's right, and that is Netanyahu wants this himself. And while it certainly is true that he is constrained by these right-wing fanatics, and maybe they've been far more bold and transparent about what they want to do, particularly to Gaza, than Netanyahu would be. I think his policies generally align with both. Wow. Is Biden in danger of being either prosecuted for genocide or losing soldiers who will refuse, American soldiers,

who will refuse to obey his orders because they constitute the perpetration of genocide. Well, Judge, I can only imagine the pretrial hearings if Biden's even competent to stand trial and could understand what's going on at the courtroom. But, you know, I absolutely agree that he should be held accountable for all these war crimes and what's being done in Gaza. Unfortunately, it's just never going to happen. By the time we would have that much change in the world, Biden will long since be gone. How about the troops? Can American troops? I mean, there are troops there. I don't know if they're on this

crazy makeshift raft that seems to be collapsing and floating out to sea, or if they're on an aircraft carrier, but we know there are troops there. How about if troops refuse to lift a finger to harm the Palestinians because of their moral belief that this perpetrates genocide? What happens to those troops? Well, I assume the Pentagon is going to try to punish them now, maybe for political reasons, they try to downplay it and allow them to take a conscientious objector status or give them some kind of other than honorable discharge. And there's a pretty interesting article by William, a story that we will be running this week at antiwar.com. And I think it's on the page today, actually, explaining the reason that more and more soldiers are going to look at the

conscientious objector status because they don't want to be a part of this. I remember the young airman, Aaron Bushnell, set himself ablaze and ultimately committed suicide in the name of, you know, opposing this war that the Pentagon is fighting and that he was a part of because he's a part of that machine. And so I do think we're going to see more dissent coming. If people just stop doing their job, I do expect the Pentagon will try to punish them. But ultimately, Judge, I think the Biden administration wants to downplay dissent as much as possible within their administration and look as cohesive as possible. Will Israel invade

Lebanon? I mean, that's a big question. I'm really worried that the answer is yes at this point. We have, again, Yoav Galant and Benjamin Netanyahu both saying recently that they're looking at winding down military operations in Gaza. Not really sure what that means. I expect them to continue to have military presence in Gaza, frequent, if not daily bombings of Gaza, but maybe less intensity, less artillery, less our tanks and things like that. They're going to relocate those from Gaza to the northern border. And they say at that point in time, Hezbollah either needs to stop and move north of the Tani River, which is several miles of Lebanon that they want Hezbollah to withdraw from. And I really doubt Hezbollah is going to agree to that. And so it does

look like there's going to be some kind of conflict. And while Washington keeps asking the Israelis not to do it and trying to negotiate deals in the Middle East to prevent it, ultimately they're saying they will give Israel what support they can to fight this war. Wow. What a mess this will be. Kyle, it's always a pleasure, my dear friend. You're like an encyclopedia. No matter what I ask you about, you have a great, well-grounded answer, and I know the audience deeply appreciates it. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Judge. Of course. Coming up at 4.30 this afternoon, a very nice interview, a nice young man who was so knowledgeable. Coming up at

4.30, the king of the hill on these interviewees, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.